IN AN industry that has persistently and excessively sexualised flight attendants, one airline has decided that an employee’s risqué behaviour has gone too far. British Airways (BA) has suspended a flight attendant for posting a video online that showed her stripping off her tights and presenting her cleavage to the camera. In uniform, the woman claimed she had been wearing “no knickers” during the flight and told the viewers, “you want me to smell my shoes and tights.” She then proceeded to do so.

If this were just an isolated case of a person with a public-facing job posting inappropriate material onto the internet, it would be an open-and-shut case that she should be fired. But it is not so simple. Flight attendants face tremendous pressure to conform to antiquated stereotypes of their profession. The chief executive of Qatar Airways recently came under fire for mocking American flight attendants as “grandmothers”, and added that “the average age of my cabin crew is only 26 years”. But he is hardly alone in believing that female cabin crew should look sexy. In fact, the Independentreports that there is a whole mini-industry around the types of garments the BA flight attendant had taken off. The paper found multiple pairs of used tights worn by flight attendants on eBay, an online auction website.

The hypersexualisation of flight attendants makes their jobs more stressful and frequently subjects them to abuse. A survey published this year of more than 3,500 American flight attendants found that more than two-thirds had experienced physical or verbal sexual abuse in their jobs. One-fifth had been physically assaulted in the past year alone, and of those, two-fifths had been improperly touched three or more times. Only 7% of flight attendants who experienced abuse reported it to their superiors, in part because they thought doing so would damage their careers.

But even when passengers provoke cabin crew, of course, there are certain types of employee misbehaviour that are inexcusable. Allegations of racial discrimination by airline workers, for example, must be taken extremely seriously. In the case of the BA flight attendant, it may also be reasonable for the airline to conclude that she crossed a line and needed to be reprimanded. But before airlines take too hard a stance on flight attendants for their sexually charged actions, carriers need to examine the workplace cultures that may give rise to this type of behaviour.

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